American journalist and family detained and harassed at US border

Ignore the sign at the United States’ border crossing near Buffalo, New York claiming those coming in from Canada will be treated with courtesy, dignity and respect. An American journalist says that’s far from what happened recently when returning home.

A producer with National Public Radio’s “On the Media” program
says the US Customs and Border Patrol agents who interrogated her
and her friends and family while they attempted to return to the
States following a recent wedding in Toronto, Ontario were
anything but courteous.

Sarah Abdurrahman told NPR that she attempted to cross into the
US at Niagara Falls earlier this month on Labor Day when CBP
agents stopper her entire party and subjected them to around six
hours of questioning.

All six people in the car were American citizens, she said.

“Once we realized we wouldn't be leaving the border facility
anytime soon, the giddiness we still had from the wedding weekend
quickly disappeared,” Abdurrahman told NPR.

For six hours, the CBP agents detained Abdurrahman, her family
and her friends, all the while refusing to even explain why they
were being held.

A division of the Department of Homeland Security, Abdurrahman
said CBP is now the largest federal law enforcement agency in the
US. Even if it’s impressive in size, though, the CBP isn’t
increasing its efforts to be transparent.

“During my detainment, I tried asking the guy in
charge, Supervisor McPherson, why we were held for so long. He
said it wasn't my right to know,” she recalled for a recent
episode of On the Media. “I asked him the names of the agents
who interacted with us while we were detained, and was once again
told it wasn't my right to know.”

One of Abdurrahman’s passenger, Sofyan Amry, said the CBP agent
seemed “like they were a bunch of frat boys,” and the
Americans attempting to legally return home “were a bunch of
initiatives just sitting there, awaiting their judgment.”

“There was not a single courtesy given,” he said, even
despite a list of the CBP’s “pledges to travelers entering the
US” that may have momentarily suggested that civil liberties
wouldn’t be stripped away over baseless assumptions.

“Even the bathroom was an ordeal. It was an uphill battle.
Absolutely no dignity, at all. We were antagonized from the
start, from the cold air to the terrible seats, to the heightened
tension and the fact that we – they were kind of laughing on the
other end of the room, kind of looking over at us like we were
huddled sheep for the slaughter,” Amry said.

Other members of the party were grilled about their religious
background. All of them were told to surrender their cell phones,
unlocked, and not expect them to be necessarily returned.

Munia Jabbar, an attorney at the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, told NPR that CAIR has noticed a pattern of CBP agents
imposing “really invasive and personal questions about their
protected religious activity” when questioning Muslim
travelers.

“You’re singling out people based on their religion and then
subjecting them to longer detentions and to humiliating
questioning about stuff that they're allowed to do legally, in
fact, stuff that is part of the bedrock of our Bill of
Rights,” Jabbar said.

The Bill of Rights also protects people against unlawful search
and seizure, but the Muslim-Americans who attempted to come home
on Labor Day weren’t allowed that right either.

“It went from, we won't search your phones to, we’re gonna
search your phone, confiscate it and not give it back to
you,” Abdurrahman’s friend Khaled Ahmed told NPR “I got
into an argument with the officer. I said, ‘Listen, all my work
is on my phone. I really need it.’ He got aggressive with me, he
said, ‘Listen, you're not leaving with your phone today.’”

“The government says only around 15 of the 1.1 million people
who enter the US each day have their electronic devices searched
by Border Patrol agents. If that's true, our three cars may have
accounted for almost all of CBP's device searches that day,”
Abdurrahman said.

Another carload of US citizens entering America from Canada at
the Detroit, Michigan crossing following the wedding near Toronto
were stopped as well, hundreds of miles away from Abdurrahman.
Weeks later, they still haven’t been told why they were held up.
The American Civil Liberties Union has since gotten involved, but
haven’t been able to come up with many answers either.

“The accounts are so widespread and so consistent, that it's
very hard to see this as anything other than a systemic problem
and not just a couple of bad apples here or there,” James
Lyle of ACLU Arizona told NPR.

Earlier this month, RT reported on how an American citizen with
ties to WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning had his cell phone and
personal computer collected, then cloned by DHS agents while
entering the US from abroad. The federal government knew that the
friend was vacationing out of the country ahead of time and used
that knowledge to eliminate his First and Fourth
Amendment-protected rights by relying on a law that limits
constitutional freedoms at border crossings.

“The government enjoys wider latitude to search people and
their belongings at the border than it possesses elsewhere, for
the purpose of protecting our borders,” the ACLU said of that
case.

“We have no way of knowing how many of those searches may have
been carried out not to search for contraband – which is the
reason ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also a division
of DHS] has been granted such broad search powers – but to
exploit border search powers to evade the Constitution,” the
ACLU said.